A communication service performed by a mobile communication provides voice and data communication services to a plurality of users in an area of a radio base station. The radio base station has coverage of some kilometers. In recent years, as the number of mobile terminals has increased and the amount of data to be processed by each mobile terminal has increased, the number of mobile terminals in an area covered by a single radio base station has increased, resulting in an increase of the amount of communication data. As a result, there is pressure on the radio frequency bandwidth and the radio base station processing load is increased. This may cause quality loss of the communication service to be provided.
To solve the above-described problem, there is a mobile communication service using a super-compact base station, which is called “femto Base Transceiver Station (BTS).” According to the above-described mobile communication service, a mobile communication service is provided by connecting a super-compact radio base station (femto BTS) to a public Internet network or the like. A cell radius of a femto cell provided by the femto BTS is small, so that the number of users stored in a cell at one time may be decreased. Accordingly, a radio section between the mobile terminal and the femto BTS may have the same state as a special line. Thus, a hi-speed data communication, and a high-quality and low-cost voice communication are expected.
As a related art for maintaining the communication quality, a function for performing priority control of data is provided in, for example, a network apparatus such as a gateway, or communication equipment such as an optical network unit, a customer network terminating unit, an adapter installed inside a building, and the like. There are related arts for maintaining the communication quality of high priority data transfer by providing a priority to the data and controlling the communication according to the priority (see, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-264562, 2007-194732, 2006-261897, 2004-129051).
An Internet connection using a broadband line, for example, is required to use the femto BTS. As for the Internet connection service in Japan, the penetration rate of the broadband line exceeds 50 percent as of March, 2007. Communication terminals connected to these broadband lines are considered to be mainly personal computers at that time.
A femto cell is connected to a broadband line to have, for example, a building as coverage of the femto cell. This makes it possible to increase the data communication speed of a mobile terminal used inside the building and to reduce the load of a conventional base station installed outside.
For example, in a building having a connection to a broadband line, an optical network unit is allocated with respect to one line drawn from the outside. A communication terminal such as a personal computer (PC) is connected to the optical network unit. To connect a plurality of communication terminals, a broadband router (hereinafter referred to as BBR) may be connected to the optical network unit, and then a plurality of computers or various equipment may be connected.
To install a femto BTS inside a building, if the femto BTS is connected to the BBR that is already allocated or a new BBR is allocated, the above-described new mobile communication service may be provided.
As described above, when the femto BTS is allocated, the communication speed of the mobile terminal may be affected by the communication speed of other terminal equipment in the building because the usable communication speed is limited according to the equipment in the building.
That is, for example, during high speed data communication performed by terminal equipment such as a PC, when a mobile terminal attempts to perform communication, the bandwidth required by the mobile terminal may not be secured, so that the communication may be restrained. Real-time communication such as voice communication or a TV telephone is restrained, which may be very stressful to a user.
The above-described problem may occur not only in the femto BTS but also in a communication apparatus that communicates with a plurality of terminal equipment including radio terminal equipment.